• Customer satisfaction with benefits and services provided by the federal government is higher than it’s been in nearly two decades. That’s despite a tumultuous year where agencies have seen a major downsizing of the federal workforce. Scores are higher on average, but the latest scorecard from the American Customer Satisfaction Index does show a few agencies are seeing lower scores. The Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Homeland Security are among the agencies with lower customer experience scores.
  (Citizen satisfaction with federal government climbs to highest score in nearly 20 years in fiscal year 2025 - American Customer Satisfaction Index )
• More information may soon come to light on how agencies are implementing some of President Donald Trump’s executive orders. OPM said it will conduct studies to find out the latest on the administration’s return-to-office policy. It’s also going to look into agencies’ removal of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs. OPM is asking all agencies to respond by the end of today with a point of contact who can provide further information for the studies.
  (Governmentwide studies on the president’s directives to end DEIA programs, and return to in-person work - Office of Personnel Management)
• A new audit found that the Defense Department is falling short in catching potential fraud, misuse and abuse of its government travel charge card program. The Pentagon’s office of inspector general said the department is not effectively using Citi’s Electronic Access System, the main tool to flag suspicious activity. Officials often could not or did not use the mandatory reports as required by regulations for oversight of the travel program due to unclear policies and inadequate training. As a result, thousands of travel card accounts were not closed or transferred when personnel left or changed units. The inspector general warned that until the Defense Travel Management Office improves the travel program controls, oversight officials will continue to miss opportunities to identify misuse or abuse within the program.
  (DoD failing to catch fraud and misuse of travel card program - Department of Defense IG)
• Operation Homefront distributed holiday meals to D.C. Guard members and their families as food-related assistance requests surge. As part of their Holiday Meals for Military program, the organization provided families with all the fixings for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, as well as Harris Teeter gift cards so families could purchase their protein of choice. With grocery prices rising and many service members still feeling the financial strain of the recent shutdown, the organization said demand for assistance has surged. Food requests alone are up 57% this year. “Our case work is up quadruple what it was 30 days ago," Operation Homefront said.
  (Operation Homefront distributes holiday meals to Guard members as food requests surge - Federal News Network)
• A Postal Service contractor has agreed to pay more than $1 million to settle allegations that it violated the False Claims Act. The Justice Department said Sky Lease falsely reported how quickly it was moving mail from domestic, Defense and State Department facilities to other locations around the world. Half the settlement amount is for restitution to the Postal Service.
  (Postal Service contractor agrees to pay more than a million dollars to settle False Claims Act allegations - Department of Justice)
• After reports that it was wrapping things up early, the Department of Government Efficiency said that's not the case. A DOGE spokesperson told Federal News Network that DOGE and its longer-term, tech-aligned counterpart, the U.S. DOGE Service, both remain and that the latter organization is moving ahead with a full slate of modernization projects. The spokesman also confirmed that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS. Reuters published a story on Monday claiming that DOGE no longer exists. That’s about eight months ahead of the schedule set by President Trump.
  (DOGE and its long-term counterpart remain, with a full slate of modernization projects underway - Federal News Network)
• OPM said about 317,000 employees have left federal service so far in 2025, going beyond the Trump administration’s workforce reduction goals. Those departures compare to just 68,000 new hires during the same timeframe. OPM Director Scott Kupor also shared insight on newly required governmentwide headcount plans, which President Trump ordered as part of an initiative to make sure four employees leave federal service for every one that joins.
  (More than 3,600 feds get notice their shutdown RIFs are rescinded - Federal News Network)
• The Trump administration is telling agencies to rethink how many senior executives they really need. Agencies have until Dec. 19 to tell the Office of Personnel Management if they want to lower, or raise, how many staffing spots they’ll allocate for senior-level positions. A new memo from OPM said this headcount review is especially important, considering the major reductions to the federal workforce that have occurred this year. That may result in a corresponding need to reduce agency spots for senior executives, according to OPM.
  (Call for agency review of executive allocations - Office of Personnel Management)

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© AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Elon Musk's big change to X has caused an apocalypse for MAGA influencers, but it's not all good news.

The Federal Communications Commission is set this week to vote on reversing cybersecurity rules for telecommunications providers that were put forward following the sweeping “Salt Typhoon” hacks.

The FCC’s meeting on Thursday includes plans to consider an order to rescind a ruling and proposed rules published in the waning days of the Biden administration. The January ruling requires telecom operators to secure their networks under Section 105 of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

But current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr argues that ruling “exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats.”

The proposed order would rescind the January ruling and withdraw proposed cybersecurity rules for telecom operators.

Instead, the FCC “should instead continue to pursue an agile and collaborative approach to cybersecurity through federal-private partnerships that protect and secure communications networks and more targeted, legally sound rulemaking and enforcement,” according to a factsheet on the order of reconsideration.

‘Worst’ hack ever

The Salt Typhoon campaign was revealed in 2024. It involved penetrating hacks into U.S. telecom networks and others across the globe. The hackers were reportedly able to target the communications of political figures and government officials, including then-candidate Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance.

U.S. officials have said Chinese-government sponsored hackers are behind the campaign. Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-Va.) has described it as “the worst telecommunications hack in our nation’s history.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has since said the Salt Typhoon campaign overlapped with global threat activities targeting multiple sectors, including telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks.

“While these actors focus on large backbone routers of major telecommunications providers, as well as provider edge (PE) and customer edge (CE) routers, they also leverage compromised devices and trusted connections to pivot into other networks,” CISA wrote in a September advisory. “These actors often modify routers to maintain persistent, long-term access to networks.”

In rolling out the January rules, Biden administration officials argued they represented a “critical step to require U.S. telecoms to improve cybersecurity to meet today’s nation state threats, including those from China’s well-resourced and sophisticated offensive cyber program.”

However, the FCC’s current leadership says the rules misinterpreted the law and “unnecessarily raised and purported to resolve issues that were not appropriate for consideration in the absence of public input.” The FCC’s factsheet also references the commission’s “recent engagement with providers and their agreement to take extensive steps to protect national security interests.”

In an October letter to the FCC, lawyers representing several telecom associations argued that the January ruling “would significantly undermine” public-private partnerships. They argued that telecom providers had voluntarily collaborated with federal agencies to investigate Salt Typhoon and adopted stronger cybersecurity measures.

Warner and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are also pressing the Department of Homeland Security to release an unclassified 2022 report on security vulnerabilities in the U.S. telecom sector. They argue that by not releasing the report, DHS is undermining public debate over how to best secure telecom networks in the wake of Salt Typhoon.

“The Salt Typhoon compromise represents one of the most serious espionage campaigns against the communications of U.S. government leaders in history, and highlighted important gaps in our nation’s communications security – in some cases, with providers ignoring basic security precautions such as credential re-use across network appliances and failure to adopt multi-factor authentication for highly privileged network administrator accounts,” Warner and Wyden wrote in a recent letter to DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Meanwhile, the House on Monday passed the “Strengthening Cyber Resilience Against State-Sponsored Threats Act.” The bill would establish a joint interagency task force to address China-linked cyber threats, including Salt Typhoon. The task force would be led by CISA, with involvement from the Justice Department, the FBI and several sector-risk management agencies.

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© AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

The Trump administration is looking to hire thousands of federal law enforcement personnel, as part of expanded immigration enforcement efforts.

But the courts handling these cases aren’t seeing the same surge in resources. Several immigration judges recently fired by the Justice Department say the court system is losing staff, and is unable to address a multi-million case backlog.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has intensified operations across the country, and detention facilities are full of individuals waiting for their cases to be heard.

The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act passed this summer gave the Department of Homeland Security billions of dollars to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, as well as 5,000 customs officers and 3,000 Border Patrol agents.

The legislation bill also authorized DOJ to hire about 100 new immigration judges, bringing their total headcount to about 800 nationwide.

But the total number of immigration judges is dwindling under the Trump administration, according to data tracked by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and its affiliate, the National Association of Immigration Judges.

According to the unions, the total number of immigration judges this year has dropped from 700 to 600. The Trump administration terminated more than 80 immigration judges since taking office, while others have retired or accepted voluntary separation incentives.

Recently terminated immigration judges say their colleagues still on the job don’t have the resources needed to address a backlog of about 3.4 million cases.

Before he was fired in September, Ted Doolittle, a former immigration judge at the immigration court in Hartford, Connecticut, was one of two judges handling about 46,000 cases.

Doolittle said he received his termination email one afternoon, as he was preparing for a docket of 57 cases the next day.

“The caseload is crushing. I think it’s probably one of the most overburdened court systems,” Doolittle said Thursday at an event at the National Press Club.

In order for the Justice Department to meaningfully address the backlog, Doolittle said the department needs about 2,000 or 3,000 immigration judges — not the few hundred currently working.

“That’s what’s going away, is the right of these people to have their cases heard fairly,” he said.

Emmett Soper, a former immigration judge in Virginia, who was fired in August after serving nine years on the job, said the widespread terminations are leading to a “chaotic situation,” where courts are scrambling to reassign cases to remaining judges.

“Each immigration judge is responsible for hundreds or thousands of these cases, and every time the administration unlawfully fires an immigration judge, they’re no longer there. Their cases have to be redistributed to the judges who remain at the court,” Soper said. “This is not a fair way to run a court system.”

Anam Petit, former immigration judge in Virginia, who was fired in September, said judges are hearing, at a minimum, 25 cases a day — sometimes 50 or more cases — in multiple languages.

“You can have a docket with five different languages,” she said.

Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said that the “lion’s share” of firings have been targeted at immigration judges who were hired during the Biden administration.

“Immigrants in this country are entitled to due process, and by firing these judges, you’re denying them their due process,” Biggs said.

To address the backlog, DOJ is training hundreds of military lawyers to temporarily serve as immigration judges. But Biggs said most of these don’t have a background in immigration law.

“We appreciate their service to our nation, and it’s no disrespect to them, but they should not be in these positions,” he said.

Federal News Network reached out to DOJ and DHS for comment.

The former judges said defendants are also failing to show up for court dates this year, because they are afraid of being detained by ICE agents afterward. Petit said that it was a “daily occurrence” for defendants in her courtroom.

“It has a huge chilling effect,” she said. “People are afraid to come to court because they’re seeing people get detained in the hallways.”

Defendants who don’t appear for their court date automatically receive a removal order, and have no legal avenue to appeal that decision.

Doolittle said ICE agents prefer making arrests in courthouses, because individuals have gone through security and been screened for weapons. He recalled that toward the end of his tenure, ICE agents repeatedly tased a suspect in the court’s lobby before bringing him into custody.

“Many of the court staff lost sleep — like physically, weren’t able to sleep for a period afterwards. And of course, it makes them question whether that’s a job they want to continue,” he said.

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The Department of Homeland Security is giving $10,000 bonuses to transportation security officers who demonstrated “exemplary service” through the government shutdown.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the bonuses during a press conference in Houston, Texas, today. She highlighted the “tens of thousands of individuals who stepped up and continued to serve” at the Transportation Security Administration despite receiving no pay through the 43-day shutdown.

Asked whether she was referring to those who did not call out sick or stay home, Noem said, “that’s not necessarily the parameters.”

“We’re going to look at every individual that did exceptional service during this period of time when there were so many hardships,” Noem said.

DHS did not immediately respond to questions about who qualifies for the bonuses. TSA employs approximately 50,000 transportation security officers, meaning a bonus for every officer would cost roughly $500 million.

In a press release, DHS said it’s paying for the bonuses using carryover funds from fiscal 2025.

Disruptions to air travel began to grow in the final weeks of the shutdown. Security lines began to grow longer as some TSA officers called out. Meanwhile, flight delays and cancellations grew as air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration began calling out of work amid multiple missed paychecks.

Noem’s announcement comes after a Truth Social post by President Donald Trump earlier this week, in which he raged at air traffic controllers who took time off during the shutdown. Trump also announced $10,000 bonuses for controllers who “didn’t take any time off for the ‘Democrat Shutdown Hoax.’”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he agreed with Trump’s idea for a $10,000 bonus for air traffic controllers who had no missed days of work. But Duffy also offered a reprieve for some employees who missed days during the shutdown.

“We have some controllers who were put in a very difficult position,” Duffy told a Wisconsin TV station on Tuesday. “They’re young. They don’t make a lot of money when they first start out. They can make some good money later in their careers, but when they start out, they’re not making a lot. They may be the sole source of income, and they were confronted with a real problem.

However, Duffy also vowed to target “continual bad actors” during the shutdown.

“If they started to take time off because the shutdown was an excuse for them, we’ll take a look at those people, and we’ll work with the union and see what an appropriate response from the FAA will be,” he said.

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© AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Following the longest shutdown in U.S. history, the federal workforce is now trying to get back to at least some sense of normalcy.

While federal employees who have been furloughed for the last 43 days return to work Thursday, the Office of Personnel Management is setting expectations for agencies as they begin to update pay, leave and benefits for those impacted by the lapse in appropriations.

In new guidance, OPM said it is “is committed to ensuring that retroactive pay is provided as soon as possible.” Compensation will be provided for both furloughed and excepted federal employees, as the spending agreement that was enacted Wednesday evening reaffirmed. A 2019 law previously called for retroactive compensation for all federal employees impacted by a shutdown.

A senior Trump administration official said the White House “has urged agencies to get employee paychecks out expeditiously and accurately to not leave anyone waiting longer than necessary.”

But the timing of employees receiving their back pay varies, depending on what payroll provider an agency uses, and the different pay schedules across the federal workforce.

Sending out retroactive payments to employees involves working across agency HR offices, federal payroll providers and shared service centers. Agency HR offices, for instance, have to submit timecards for federal employees, which are then processed by the government’s various payroll providers.

According to the senior administration official, employees from the General Services Administration and OPM will be among the first to receive their retroactive paychecks, with an expected deposit date set for Saturday.

Employees at the departments of Veterans Affairs, Energy, and Health and Human Services, as well as civilian employees from the Defense Department, will receive their deposits shortly after that — this Sunday.

On Monday, affected employees from the departments of Education, State, Interior and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Social Security Administration and NASA, are all expected to receive their back pay.

Then on Wednesday, employees from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, Labor and Justice, along with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Small Business Administration, are projected to get their paychecks. The timing of the retroactive payments for feds was first reported by Semafor.

The National Finance Center, a payroll provider housed under the Agriculture Department, confirmed that employees at agencies using NFC’s services should expect a payroll deposit by the middle of next week.

“In order to provide backpay for employees as quickly as possible, the National Finance Center will be expediting pay processing for pay period 22 and backpay for pay periods 19 (October 1-4), 20 (October 5-18), and 21 (October 19-November 1),” USDA wrote in an all-staff email Wednesday evening, obtained by Federal News Network.

Federal News Network has reached out to several other federal payroll providers requesting details on the timeline for processing retroactive payments.

The National Treasury Employees Union urged immediate back pay for all federal employees who have been going without compensation for the last six weeks.

“This is an emergency for federal employees across the country, and they should not have to wait another minute longer for the paychecks they lost during the longest government shutdown in history,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said. “We call on all federal agencies to process the back pay immediately.”

In its new guidance, OPM also noted that to make payments as quickly as possible, payroll providers may need to “make some adjustments.” That could mean, for instance, that the initial retroactive payments employees receive might not reflect the exact calculations of their pay and leave hours.

“Payroll providers will work with agencies to make any necessary adjustments as soon as practicable,” OPM said.

Who receives back pay, and how much?

Furloughed employees will receive their “standard rate of pay” for the hours they would have worked if the government shutdown hadn’t occurred, OPM said in its guidance Wednesday evening.

But there are some exceptions to that. If a furloughed employee, for example, had been scheduled for overtime hours that would have occurred during the shutdown, OPM said they should be paid their premium rate for those hours.

Additionally, OPM said that allowances, differentials and other types of payments, like administratively uncontrollable overtime pay or law enforcement availability pay, should be paid as if the furloughed employee continued to work.

Although most employees impacted by the shutdown are ensured back pay, there are some smaller exceptions carved out where employees may not receive retroactive pay, OPM added.

If a furloughed employee was in a non-pay status before the shutdown began, for instance, then they are not entitled to receive back pay.

Excepted employees who were considered “absent without leave” (AWOL) — or in other words, took unapproved time off — will also not receive back pay for that time.

Guidance on leave, post-shutdown

Although excepted employees are not required to use paid leave for taking time off during the shutdown — and can instead enter a “furlough” period — there may still have been some instances where excepted employees took leave during the funding lapse, OPM wrote in its guidance.

In those cases, excepted employees who were approved to take paid leave during the shutdown will be charged for the hours from their leave bank, OPM said.

Agencies are also expected to begin adjusting leave accrual for furloughed employees. Now that the shutdown is over, furloughed employees should be placed in a “pay status” for the time they would have otherwise spent working during the funding lapse. That means accrual of annual and sick leave will be retroactively adjusted as if the employees were in a pay status, OPM said.

Excepted employees continued to accrue leave during the shutdown, which should be reflected in their leave banks, OPM said.

What happens to RIFs of federal employees?

On top of reaffirming back pay, the spending bill that was enacted Wednesday evening also rescinds the roughly 4,000 reductions in force that have occurred since Oct. 1. Federal employees will be temporarily protected from additional RIFs, at least until the end of January.

Agencies have five days to inform federal employees who received RIF notices in October that those actions are rescinded.

“Agencies should issue those notices and confirm to OPM the rescissions have been issued,” OPM’s guidance states.

At least 670,000 federal employees have been furloughed, and 730,000 employees have been working without pay during the shutdown. Agencies have been putting plans in the works to return all furloughed federal employees to their duties as of Thursday.

OPM also said agencies “may consider” providing flexibility for employees who might not be able to return to work immediately, such as by approving personal leave or adjusting individual work schedules.

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency developed a zero trust architecture that features five pillars.

The Defense Department’s zero trust architecture includes seven pillars.

The one the Department of Homeland Security is implementing takes the best of both architectures and adds a little more to the mix.

Don Yeske, who recently left federal service after serving for the last two-plus years as the director of national security in the cyber division at DHS, said the agency had to take a slightly different approach for several reasons.

“If you look at OMB [memo] M-22-09 it prescribes tasks. Those tasks are important, but that itself is not a zero trust strategy. Even if you do everything that M-22-09 told us to do — and by the way, those tasks were due at the beginning of this year — even if you did it all, that doesn’t mean, goal achieved. We’re done with zero trust. Move on to the next thing,” Yeske said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “What it means is you’re much better positioned now to do the hard things that you had to do and that we hadn’t even contemplated telling you to do yet. DHS, at the time that I left, was just publishing this really groundbreaking architecture that lays out what the hard parts actually are and begins to attack them. And frankly, it’s all about the data pillar.”

The data pillar of zero trust is among the toughest ones. Agencies have spent much of the past two years focused on other parts of the architecture, like improving their cybersecurity capabilities in the identity and network pillars.

Yeske, who now is a senior solutions architect federal at Virtru, said the data pillar challenge for DHS is even bigger because of the breadth and depth of its mission. He said between the Coast Guard, FEMA, Customs and Border Protection and CISA alone, there are multiple data sources, requirements and security rules.

“What’s different about it is we viewed the problem of zero trust as coming in broad phases. Phase one, where you’re just beginning to think about zero trust, and you’re just beginning to adjust your approach, is where you start to take on the idea that my network boundary can’t be my primary, let alone sole line of defense. I’ve got to start shrinking those boundaries around the things that I’m trying to protect,” he said. “I’ve got to start defending within my network architecture, not just from the outside, but start viewing the things that are happening within my network with suspicion. Those are all building on the core tenants of zero trust.”

Capabilities instead of product focused

He said initial zero trust strategy stopped there, segmenting networks and protecting data at rest.

But to get to this point, he said agencies too often are focused on implementing specific products around identity or authentication and authorization processes.

“It’s a fact that zero trust is something you do. It’s not something you buy. In spite of that, federal architecture has this pervasive focus on product. So at DHS, the way we chose to describe zero trust capability was as a series of capabilities. We chose, without malice or forethought, to measure those capabilities at the organization, not at the system, not at the component, not as a function of design,” Yeske said. “Organizations have capabilities, and those capabilities are comprised of three big parts: People. Who’s responsible for the thing you’re describing within your organization? Process. How have you chosen to do the thing that you’re describing at your organization and products? What helps you do that?”

Yeske said the third part is technology, which, too often, is intertwined with the product part.

He said the DHS architecture moved away from focusing on product or technology, and instead tried to answer the simple, yet complex, questions: What’s more important right now? What are the things that I should spend my limited pool of dollars on?

“We built a prioritization mechanism, and we built it on the idea that each of those capabilities, once we understand their inherent relationships to one another, form a sort of Maslow’s hierarchy of zero trust. There are things that are more basic, that if you don’t do this, you really can’t do anything else, and there are things that are really advanced, that once you can do basically everything else you can contemplate doing this. And there are a lot of things in between,” he said. “We took those 46 capabilities based on their inherent logical relationships, and we came up with a prioritization scheme so that you could, if you’re an organization implementing zero trust, prioritize the products, process and technologies.”

Understanding cyber tool dependencies

DHS defined those 46 capabilities based on the organization’s ability to perform that function to protect its data, systems or network.

Yeske said, for example, with phishing-resistant, multi-factor authentication, DHS didn’t specify the technology or product needed, but just the end result of the ability to authenticate users using multiple factors that are resistant to phishing.

“We’re describing something your organization needs to be able to do because if you can’t do that, there are other things you need to do that you won’t be able to do. We just landed on 46, but that’s not actually all that weird. If you look at the Defense Department’s zero trust roadmap, it contains a similar number of things they describe as capability, which are somewhat different,” said Yeske, who spent more than 15 years working for the Navy and Marine Corps before coming to DHS. “We calculated a 92% overlap between the capabilities we described in our architecture and the ones DoD described. And the 8% difference is mainly because the DHS one is brand new. So just understanding that the definition of each of these capabilities also includes two types of relationships, a dependency, which is where you can’t have this capability unless you first had a different one.”

Yeske said before he left DHS in July, the zero trust architecture and framework had been approved for use and most of the components had a significant number of cyber capabilities in place.

He said the next step was assessing the maturity of those capabilities and figuring out how to move them forward.

If other agencies are interested in this approach, Yeske said the DHS architecture should be available for them to get a copy of.

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Democrats in Congress are pressing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to restore oversight staff who were furloughed at the start of the government shutdown.

In a Nov. 6 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the lawmakers said that staff at the Office of Detention Oversight are crucial to ensuring safety at ICE detention centers. Staff at ODO were furloughed at the outset of the shutdown.

“Without ODO staff actively performing these duties, there is a heightened risk that detention facilities fail to meet required standards, compromising detainee safety, access to medical care, and legal protections,” the lawmakers wrote to Noem.

The lawmakers also point out that the Department of Homeland Security’s shutdown contingency plan includes exceptions for the safety of human life and protection of property.

“This is not hypothetical – ICE has publicly reported that at least twenty people have died in its custody since January,” they added.

The letter points to reports of overcrowding and other unsafe conditions at ICE detention facilities, as immigration enforcement operations have continued through the shutdown.

“Given these developments, we are deeply concerned about the health and safety of detainees and staff at ICE facilities during the ongoing lapse in appropriations,” the letter states. “The decision to furlough the entire ODO is a clear attempt to sabotage oversight into the conditions of ICE facilities and the wellbeing of detainees.”

The letter was led by Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) and also signed by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.).

In a separate Oct. 31 letter to Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) pointed out that ICE furloughed ODO staff despite receiving an influx of funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“I recognize that certain nonessential functions must pause during a lapse in appropriations,” Dexter wrote. “However, a lack of funding cannot be used as justification to strip away any measure of accountability. To safeguard the health, safety, and dignity of my constituents, I urge you to reinstate necessary staff for the Office of Detention Oversight, immediately restore communication channels between ICE and congressional offices, and ensure Members of Congress have access to all ICE facilities.”

In an Oct. 17 letter, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said DHS furloughing ODO employees while retaining all press and communications staffers raises “serious questions about the department’s priorities during this shutdown.”

“ODO’s inspectors are responsible for ensuring that facilities meet federal health, safety, and humane treatment standards,” Krishnamoorthi wrote. “With detention levels now among the highest in more than a decade, suspending this critical oversight function while enforcement operations proceed uninterrupted is indefensible and represents a profound failure of priorities.”

The ODO furloughs come as the number of ICE detainees reach record high levels. As of Sept. 21, there were nearly 60,000 people in ICE custody.

ODO was created in 2009 to inspect ICE detention facilities. The office conducts a separate set of inspections independent from inspections run by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations’ Custody Management Division.

The furloughs at ODO come after DHS also fired most staff at several oversight offices earlier this year.

The reductions-in-force at those offices – the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman – are now at issue in an ongoing lawsuit.

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© AP Photo/Stephen Smith

OPINION — “The [Defense] Department [DoD] will continue to defend the nation and conduct ongoing military operations. It will continue activities funded with any available budgetary resources that have not lapsed (e.g., funds made available in Pub. L. 119-21), as well as excepted activities such as those necessary for the safety of human life and the protection of property. Significant activities that will continue during a lapse are summarized in this planning guidance document. Activities that are determined not to be excepted, and which cannot be performed by utilizing military personnel in place of furloughed civilian personnel, will be suspended when appropriated funds are no longer available. The Secretary of War may, at any time, determine that additional activities shall be treated as excepted.”

That is a quote from the DoD’s September 2025 Contingency Plan Guidance For Continuation Of Operations In The Absence Of Available Appropriations, issued “For Planning Purposes Only - Do Not Implement Until Direction from the Deputy Secretary of War or his Designee.”

This document, it states, “provides guidance for identifying those missions and functions of the Department of War (DoW) that may continue to be carried out in the absence of available appropriations.”

I must point out, because it’s the reason I’m writing this column, that the Public Law referred to above, Pub. L. 119-21, is none other than the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed by Congress July 3, and signed by President Trump into law on July 4.

A bit of history: The OBBBA was designed by the Republicans to enact all of Trump’s second-term tax and spending policies in a giant, 1,100-page piece of legislation. The Congressional Budget Office said the measure would result in a decrease in direct spending of $1.1 trillion, but also a decrease in revenues of $4.5 trillion, increasing the U.S. deficit by $3.4 trillion over the 2025-to-2034 period.

To get the OBBBA passed, the Trump White House and Republicans in Congress used the fiscal 2025 budget reconciliation process, which allowed them to avoid the 60-vote Senate filibuster. With universal Democratic opposition, it passed the House by a 218-to-214 vote, and the Senate by a 51-to-50 margin, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tiebreaking vote.

As I wrote last June, the OBBBA was “extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and reducing Medicaid spending – [and] also contains authorization and appropriation for an additional $150 billion for fiscal 2025 defense spending.”

That additional $150 billion for defense spending, because it was considered part of 2025 appropriations, is available to be spent during the current shutdown and through 2029, according to the terms of the OBBBA.

Credit for anticipating the need to put that $150 billion in the 2025 reconciliation measure, and not in the fiscal 2026 budget request, must be shared by Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Late last April, without much publicity, the Hill Republicans added the $150 billion to the OBBBA reconciliation bill with White House support.

They also added another $170 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies that I will discuss below.

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Back in June, I wrote that the Congress in the reconciliation bill called for the Defense Secretary “to deliver to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees within 60 days of the bill passing Congress” a plan detailing how the added $150 billion appropriated to DoD would be spent. Whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did or not is unclear.

However, DoD’s September 2025 Contingency Plan Guidance said, “As of September 2025, the [Defense] Department considers efforts to the support the following among its highest priorities: Operations to secure the U.S. Southern Border; Middle East operations; Golden Dome for America; Depot Maintenance; Shipbuilding; Critical Munitions.”

No surprise, that section adds, “As in every case, efforts supporting these activities may occur during a lapse when resourced with funds that remain available -- to include those provided in Pub. L. 119-21,” the OBBBA.

It turns out, the OBBBA had a section entitled, “Improving Department of Defense Border Support and Counter-Drug Missions.” That section provided an additional $1 billion for fiscal 2025 to be used “for the deployment of military personnel in support of border operations, operations and maintenance activities in support of border operations, counter-narcotics and counter-transnational criminal organization mission support.”

The need for U.S. southern border money for DoD was obvious. But back in July, who publicly was thinking of using DoD assets for “counter-narcotics and counter-transnational criminal organization mission support?” It was not until late August that the public learned of a U.S. Navy buildup in the southern Caribbean to combat drug trafficking, and the first so-called Venezuelan narco-boat was destroyed September 2.

Yet back in early June, it appears, the Trump administration sought and got Congress to approve fiscal 2025 funds to finance what have become these current Caribbean counter-narcotics military operations in the OBBBA. And the same words, “counter-narcotic and counter-transnational criminal organization” were used to describe the targets in justification letters sent the Congress after narco-boat destructions.

Three other of the “highest priority” elements mentioned in the DoD’s September 2025 Contingency Plan Guidance were also singled out in the OBBBA for allocation of funds from the extra $150 billion added to fiscal 2025 defense spending.

A section entitled “Enhancement of Department of Defense Resources for Shipbuilding” was allocated $29 billion. This included $750 million for additional supplier development across the naval shipbuilding industrial base; $500 million for advanced manufacturing techniques in the shipbuilding industrial base; $500 million for additional dry-dock capability; and $450 million for additional maritime industrial workforce development programs.

Another section for Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense program entitled “Enhancement of Department of Defense Resources for Integrated Air and Missile Defense,” was allocated $25 billion. This included $7.2 billion for the development, procurement, and integration of military space-based sensors; $5.6 billion for development of space-based and boost phase intercept capabilities; $2.55 billion for the development, procurement, and integration of military missile defense capabilities; and $2.2 billion for acceleration of hypersonic defense systems.

A third section of the OBBBA entitled “Enhancement of Department of Defense Resources for Munitions and Defense Supply Chain Resiliency,” also got $25 billion. This included $5 billion for investments in critical minerals supply chains; another $2 billion for additional activities to improve the U.S. stockpile of critical minerals; $1 billion for the creation of next-generation automated munitions production factories; $688 million for the development, production, and integration of long-range multi-service cruise missiles; and $300 million for the production of Army medium-range ballistic missiles.

As I mentioned above, there was another $170 billion for the Department of Homeland Security added to OBBBA and it is money available to be spent during the shutdown.

For example, there was $46.5 billion for elements for the new border infrastructure and border wall system; $45 billion for single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity; and $6.2 billion for procurement and integration of new inspection equipment to combat the entry or exit of illicit narcotics at ports of entry and along the southwest, northern, and maritime borders.

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On the personnel side, there was $4.1 billion to hire and train additional Border Patrol agents, Office of Field Operations officers, Air and Marine agents, rehired annuitants, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection field support personnel; and another $2.1 billion to provide recruitment bonuses, performance awards, or annual retention bonuses to eligible Border Patrol agents, Office of Field Operations officers, and Air and Marine agents.

Another OBBBA provision provided $10 billion “to remain available until September 30, 2029, for reimbursement of costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.”

Three other items need no explanation.

In the OBBBA there was $625 million for security and other costs related to the 2026 FIFA [Soccer] World Cup, and $1 billion for security, planning, and other costs related to the 2028 Olympics.

Finally, there was $300 million included for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to reimburse state or local law enforcement personnel “for protection activities directly and demonstrably associated with any [non-governmental] residence of the President.” That would cover, at a minimum, Mar-A-Lago in Florida, Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey and Trump Tower in New York. According to one news story, Trump during his first four years in office traveled to his properties nearly 550 times.

Under this OBBBA provision, the reimbursement would be available only for costs that a state or local agency incurred or incurs on or after July 1, 2024; demonstrated to the FEMA Administrator as being in excess of typical law enforcement operation costs; and was directly attributable to Presidential protection requested by the U.S. Secret Service.

One has to admit that Trump and key members of his staff clearly did some advance planning when they put together the OBBBA – maybe they even foresaw a government shutdown.

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